How to Eliminate GMAT Test-Day Anxiety

A little bit of test-day anxiety is natural and expected for even the most well-prepared GMAT-taker. After all, the GMAT can have a significant impact on your admission to business school. However, too much anxiety on test-day has the potential to cloud your concentration and derail your GMAT performance. If you are a student who tends to worry about your GMAT score or get stressed or anxious while taking the GMAT, keep reading. In this article, we’ll look at a number of practical and actionable strategies to help you eliminate test-day anxiety and perform at your highest level.

Let’s start by taking a look at some common symptoms of test-day anxiety.


Test-day anxiety can affect the mind and body in numerous ways. Some common signs and symptoms include:

• Your mind feels blank while taking the test.
• It’s hard to make sense of the questions. You read and reread, but you just can’t figure out what the questions are asking.
• After the fact, you reflect on the questions and know that you had the ability to answer them correctly, although you couldn’t solve them in the moment.
• Your thoughts are racing and you feel unfocused.
• Your concentration level is poor.
• You’re worried about how you’re performing.
• Your breathing is faster than normal.
• Your heart rate is faster than normal.
• You feel tense.
• You feel lightheaded, faint, or dizzy.
• You’re sweating.
• You have cramps.
• You have dry mouth.

If you’ve experienced these symptoms while taking the GMAT (or a practice exam) or thinking about your upcoming exam, you may have been experiencing test anxiety.

Let’s look at what causes these symptoms.


A little bit of anxiety is good, as it is a normal physiological response to situations that could result in harm and thus require a heightened state of alertness from our bodies. Anxiety increases our level of awareness, our visual and auditory sensations, and our processing skills. However, as our level of anxiety increases, we can see a steep drop in our performance. This drop in performance is attributed to what is known as the fight-or-flight response.

During the fight-or-flight response, our bodies prepare to either fight a threat or escape from it. A number of physiological processes occur to ready us to fight or flee: digestion shuts off (no time to eat while running from a lion), pupils dilate to temporarily enhance our vision, glucose and stress-hormone levels rise to provide energy to our muscles, and blood leaves certain regions of the brain that focus on higher-level thought, flooding the muscles, heart, and lungs and readying the body for a physical confrontation.

The fight-or-flight response is an evolutionary adaptation that likely served us well in the distant past, during an encounter with a bear or a rival clan looking to steal our food, but it isn’t always appropriate in our modern lives. If you’ve ever been angry and said something quickly that you later regretted, your outburst was likely the result of the decreased cognitive functions that result from the fight-or-flight response. Our fight-or-flight response is triggered in seconds, but its effects last well beyond the point at which a threat, or perceived threat, has disappeared.

When taking the GMAT, if your anxiety level is too high, your fight-or-flight response may kick in and make it difficult to focus on the problem at hand. Blood is leaving part of your brain to be available to your muscles. It’s obvious to say that on the GMAT, your brain is your most powerful asset. After all, you don’t reason through an algebra problem with your quadriceps. Those can help you land a spinning roundhouse kick on an enemy, but they’re not so useful in helping you set up an equation.

One of the keys to earning your highest possible score on the GMAT (aside from, of course, mastering GMAT content), is taking the necessary steps to minimize stress related to your exam and mitigate any anxiety that arises on the big day. Luckily, there are simple yet effective strategies that all GMAT students can follow to help decrease their test anxiety and increase their scores.


The better you know the material, the more relaxed you’ll be on GMAT test day. This is the most obvious yet overlooked strategy to reduce GMAT anxiety. Consider a 31-question math test on basic multiplication and division. Would you be nervous about taking that test? Perhaps a few people would be, but most people are very comfortable with multiplication and division. How did they achieve this comfort? Well, they’ve been practicing multiplication and division for many years. That is, they are well-prepared to tackle questions involving those operations.

Now, change those 31 math questions to ones involving number properties, roots and exponents, divisibility, shaded regions, and probability, and all of a sudden, people get a little nervous. Why? Well, they know that they are not that strong with those concepts. Their bodies know this fact, too, and their bodies are telling them that this test is a momentous one and they may not be prepared to effectively handle its challenges. That’s stressful!

So, what do you do? Prepare, prepare, prepare! Then, after you have prepared enough, prepare some more. There is nothing better for combating test anxiety than to be so prepared that the material is no longer a source of stressful. Here is a good strategy: Don’t practice until you can get questions right; practice so much that you can’t get them wrong.

Once you know in your heart of hearts that you are properly prepared for the GMAT, the test won’t be that anxiety-provoking. In fact, it may even be enjoyable. After all, you’ll be able to put all of your hard work to good use and show the test what you’re made of!

In addition to being as comfortable as possible with GMAT content, you must be comfortable with the test-taking experience in order to reduce anxiety on GMAT test day. Achieving this level of comfort requires practice.


There is an old saying in sports: “You won’t play any better than you practice.” In other words, if you take a lackluster approach to your training, don’t expect to perform well on game day. The GMAT is no different. There are students who do a lot of preparation with GMAT material yet fail to take enough practice tests before the real deal. This is a bankrupt strategy. If a boxer builds great technique and stamina on the heavy and speed bags, but never gets in the ring to spar prior to fight night, how well can the real fight go?

Taking (and reviewing) all six official practice tests from mba.com is an excellent way to reduce test anxiety because you build comfort and familiarity with the GMAT that you can’t get from simply doing problem sets or untimed practice. When you take many full-length practice tests under realistic testing conditions, you desensitize yourself to the process of taking the GMAT. Thus, to a large degree, you make the real GMAT feel like just another day and just another practice test.

For example, one of my former GMAT students told me that the test center where she took her GMAT was so cold that she had to wear her coat to take the exam. Meanwhile, she had not slept well the night before. However, as a person who had started off with low confidence in her test-taking skills, she had taken many practice tests, and she realized that this day was not much different from many others on which she had awakened, eaten breakfast, and taken a practice GMAT. So, in spite of issues that she could have responded to by becoming anxious, she exceeded her dream score that day.

Of course, it’s essential to properly plan and space out your practice tests, so that you can leverage them to your greatest advantage. Check out this article for more advice on how to use GMAT practice tests to help reach your score goal.


The best of the best in any field know that battles are won and lost in the time leading up to the battle. Often, people mistakenly believe that winning or losing has everything to do with the battle itself. We know that preparation and practice are crucial, but if you don’t believe in your ability to succeed, you could be sabotaging yourself before you even get the chance to put your skills to work. You must visualize yourself being successful. You must visualize yourself correctly answering questions on the GMAT and earning a high score. You must feel it and believe it.

Many top professional athletes use visualization to gain a game-day edge. The human brain is an amazing machine, and we often underestimate the large role that our thoughts play in our performance. Remember that your thoughts become your actions, and your actions become your life. You have a choice as to how you feel. If you believe that you cannot lose, you’re all but guaranteed to perform at your best.

For 15 minutes each day, visualize your success. If you have never tried this before or are skeptical as to the efficacy of visualization, you are the person most in need of this exercise. You need not do anything sophisticated. Visualization can be as simple as sitting quietly for five minutes at a time, three times a day, and thinking positively. You could visualize:

• Little elves placing necessary GMAT knowledge in your brain.
• Remembering everything you learn during the study process.
• Developing a deep mastery of the material.
• Recognizing and knowing how to solve all of the questions you encounter on test day.
• Being happy and feeling positive during the test.
• Being fast and accurate during the test.
• Walking out of the test center feeling amazing with an exceptional GMAT score in hand.
• Writing your essays knowing that you’ve already earned a great GMAT score.

Another type of visualization that you can do to reduce test anxiety relates to what is called exposure therapy.


Exposure therapy involves changing fearful or self-sabotaging responses by putting the people in situations that trigger those responses, thus creating opportunities to practice responding differently. For instance, a person who is afraid of heights would spend some time in high places learning to manage that response.

Interestingly, merely visualizing being in a situation that triggers an anxious response can produce the same response that actually being in that situation does. So, to learn to stay cool while taking the GMAT, you can imagine that you are taking the GMAT, and feel and learn to manage any anxious responses that arise. If, when you think of the test, career-related pressure triggers anxious feelings, you could visualize yourself taking the test and feeling that pressure, and practice acknowledging that feeling without becoming anxious. You could visualize yourself getting an easy question and wondering whether that is a sign that you didn’t get the previous question correct. How do you respond to that situation? How do you want to respond?

You can take this type of “soft” exposure therapy to a fairly sophisticated level by doing things such as looking at pictures of the interiors of test centers. There are plenty such pictures available online. How do you respond to seeing those test centers? How do you want to respond? Practice responding the way you want to respond.

You could even drive to the test center a few times. During the drive, practice feeling confident and ready to take the test.

The basic idea is to get used to handling the things that you respond to anxiously until you don’t respond that way any longer. As you do this exposure therapy, don’t seek to repress anxiety; rather, notice how you are responding and sit with any anxiety you feel until you calm down. You can also think about how you respond and consider alternative ideas, for instance, that becoming anxious over your career goals is not doing you any good. Can you talk yourself out of becoming anxious? Essentially, yes, you can.

Of course, if you want to be less anxious about the GMAT, recognizing and limiting anxiety in all areas of your life can help.